Anyone Tried a SAS 3008 or Perc h330 Controller?


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21 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

This is great info @LammeN3rd Thank you! I am learning a lot from you. Is Databolt only on the LSI cards though? (I thought it was an LSI Technology?)

 

I was going to go down the route of running 2 cards and keeping only the 12gb SAS drives on the H330 as I believe if I connect my 12GB SAS Drives on the same card as my 6GB SATA Drives the card would only run as fast as the slowest drive?  The reason for this thinking was to keep the parity drives on 12GB SAS.

 

What expander do you use on the PERC H330?

 

Here is my motherboard config and I think I would have an issue doing this as the PCI Lanes would slow down due to the amount of cards I have installed?

 

I have a PERC H330 PCIeX8 Gen3 on the way going in slot 1

SAS 2008 PCIeX8 Gen2 (6GB/S) Slot 2

Mellonox 10gbe PCIeX8 Gen2 slot 3

 

 

maximus.JPG

 

the Link speed of these controllers is per disk (when direct connected to the controller without expander)

so if you connect both 6Gbit and 12Gbit directly to an H330 both will run their full speeds.

 

with expanders it's an different story and without DataBold it will run on the lowest speed.

DataBold is as far as I know its an LSI tech so you need an compatible LSI expander and LSI controller

 

From the graph you should be running in Config 3 so you get max BW to all cards!

 

if I remember correctly I'm running the SAS35X28R SAS EXPANDER connected with 8 lanes to the H330 (both ports)

this is my full config:

 

Dell Poweredge T630 | unRAID 6.6.6 - Pro | 2x E5-2640 V4 | 128GB ECC REG | PERC H330 12Gbit SAS (HBA Mode) | 18x Hotplug disks with 12Gbit SAS expander Backplane

Array 72TB with Dual Parity | HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB [ P1, P2 ,D1, D2, D3 ] | Seagate IronWolf 6TB [ D4, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10 ] 

Cache 1920 GB RAID1 | 4x Samsung PM963 960GB NVMe

Edited by LammeN3rd
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Ah, that's fantastic, 

 

I would be able to run my SAS 12GB Drives and 6GB SATA Drives all off the PERC H330 then!  So I can lose the SAS 2008 completely as I have 8 SATA Ports on my Motherboard as well to run my 6GB/S SATA Drives (I have 16 Drives in total) 

 

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

 

Many Thanks Again For All Your Time! 

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4 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

Ah, that's fantastic, 

 

I would be able to run my SAS 12GB Drives and 6GB SATA Drives all off the PERC H330 then!  So I can lose the SAS 2008 completely as I have 8 SATA Ports on my Motherboard as well to run my 6GB/S SATA Drives (I have 16 Drives in total) 

 

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

 

Many Thanks Again For All Your Time! 

If you can, don't use you motherboard SATA, these are horrible! (no matter what board you have)

sata drives are fine for storage SATA controllers however are not made for parallel acces, in the best case they cripple your performance in the worst case you have drives dropping out putting your array in danger!

Edited by LammeN3rd
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Yes!

 

the Z77 chipset is connected by a DMI bus to you cpu (4x PCIe) and the ASMedia is connected to the Z77 

 

running an SAS 2008 on an 4x PCIe (gen2 because the SAS2008 does not support GEN3) gives you max 250MB/s per disk with 8 disks in parallel. if you only connect HDD you will only get there with very big and fast drives!

 

Besides speed SAS controllers (at least from LSI) are way more stable reason enough to stick to those since they cost very little nowadays 

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15 minutes ago, mbc0 said:

One last question if you don't mind, would I be better off putting my SSD Cache Drive (6GB/S SATA) on the PERC rather than a SATA 3 connector on the Motherboard?

Use the onboard Intel controller, LSI with RAID driver most likely doesn't support trim, and LSI with HBA driver only supports trim on SSDs with read zero after trim or deterministic read after trim.

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13 minutes ago, LammeN3rd said:

 


Only when you use a sas expander, with direct connected sas 6gb and Sata 3 disks you don’t really have an advantage.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

 

So if I use the PERC H330 for my SAS 12gb/S Drives & SATA 3 Drives I will get 12gb/S Performance on my SAS & 6GB Performance on my SATA's BUT if I use an expander on that PERC H330 then I will only get the performance speed of the lowest drive... I hope I have got this right?

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Let me try to see if I get this :D  If drives are connected to the controller directly, they get the most out of the drive's speed directly.  It's only when you use an expander, that will split the bandwidth (if that is what we call it), and in old controllers, use the speed of the slowest device, will using an H330 benefit, since it has that LSI technology.

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7 minutes ago, jang430 said:

Let me try to see if I get this :D  If drives are connected to the controller directly, they get the most out of the drive's speed directly.  It's only when you use an expander, that will split the bandwidth (if that is what we call it), and in old controllers, use the speed of the slowest device, will using an H330 benefit, since it has that LSI technology.

Almost, with the H330 or another SAS3008 based card to get the full speed while using slower disks you need an expander that supports DataBold (aka an LSI 12Gbit SAS expander) 

 

if you use a expander that does not support databold and you connect a bunch of 6Gbit (sas or sata) and 12Gbit SAS all will run at the slow speed

Edited by LammeN3rd
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5 hours ago, LammeN3rd said:

Better yet, get your tech info first-hand: From LSI (white paper on Databolt)

[to borrow an old Unix joke: "Use the source, Luke."]

This paper also gives a good overview on expanders.

 

Oh, as for the queried controller in the OP ... if Chiney-fakes weren't bad enough, this one must also be avoided on moral grounds. To make such a denigrating reference/inference on the most innovative and impactful OS is pure blasphemy ... Unicaca ... feh!!!! :):)

Quote

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck running a Unicaca SAS 3008 ...

 

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Does this mean when using Dell H330 with SAS 6Gb drives, I'll see significant performance improvement against my existing H310, with SATA 2 and 3 drives when copying data from Cache (SSD) to Array?  My reasoning is SAS 6GB capable of 230 MBps while SATA spin drives can only do 100-170 MBps only?

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